Illustrated Life
Rhodesia.
INVESTIGATING THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
IN UDI PERIOD RHODESIAN ADVERTISING AND PRINT
JOURNALISM.
O'DRISCOLL, O.
1
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements and Information ...2
Introduction ...3
Literature Review ...4
Methodology ...6
Chapter 1: The Early History of Southern Rhodesia ... 11
British South African Identity Formation ... 12
The Gold Rush and the Creation of Rhodesia ... 15
Early Development of Southern Rhodesia ... 18
Conclusion ... 22
Chapter 2: Rhodesia up to the Federation ... 27
Introduction ... 28
The Land Apportionment Act ... 32
The Industrial Conciliation Act ... 36
The Post-War Boom ... 37
Chapter 3: Illustrated Life Rhodesia ... 43
Introduction ... 44
Overview of Content and Editorial Positions ... 46
Advertisements and Imagery in ILR ... 52
Gender in Advertising ... 52
Domestic Environments and Suburbia ... 55
Nationalism and Identity ... 58
Language ... 60
Race ... 61
Conclusion ... 65
Opportunities for Further Research ... 68
Appendix ... 72
2
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Anne Marieke van der Wal-Rémy, for all her help in completing this project, as well as all the lecturers and staff of the MA History program in Leiden. I would furthermore like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University for granting me access to their collection of issues of Illustrated Life Rhodesia, and for all their help during my stay in Oxford. A special thanks is also due to my colleague Sebastian Strohmayer for his help in developing my ideas during our conversations on the subject.
Completed as part of the Master in History Program at Universiteit Leiden, 2018-2019.
Word count: 19,205. Date: 29/08/19
Author: Oisín O’Driscoll
3
Illustrated Life Rhodesia; Investigating the Construction of National Identity in UDI Period Rhodesian Advertising and Print Journalism.
On the 11th of November 1965, the Rhodesian cabinet adopted the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, proclaiming their immediate secession from British control and the establishment of an independent, white-minority ruled nation. The move was the result of a protracted conflict with Britain over the terms under which the country could be granted independence, specifically the prerequisite of a transfer to democratic majority rule. The UDI was considered by Britain to be illegal, and Rhodesia would remain a pariah state under economic sanctions and without international recognition up to its dissolution in 1979. Before and after the state entered into rebellion, it was often commented that white Rhodesians exhibited a form of ‘Little Britain’ culture, reflecting an exaggerated version of what they considered to be traditional British cultural values. In the context of the late British Empire, this often manifested as a form of ultra-loyalism, in which an idealized conceptualization of said cultural values (often discussed in terms of ‘British Standards’) were placed at the core of the community’s identity and membership of the Empire was seen as under-writing the future survival of the territory as ‘white man’s country’.1 From 1965 to 1979, this same ultra-British identity was employed in a discourse of rebellion
against that same imperial motherland, often expressed as a rebellion against a declining metropole in the context of decolonization in Africa. The Rhodesians also frequently placed themselves in an anti-communist continuum, in which ‘socialist’ Britain was abandoning the ‘standards of civilisation’, leaving it up to them to defend an imperial legacy defined by Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith as ‘justice, civilisation and Christianity’.2
This paper will seek to explore the formulation of a national identity in Rhodesia before and during the UDI period, with a particular emphasis on how the state related to concepts of Britishness and how they employed the language of ‘standards’ in service of a nationalist project. To do so it begins with a survey of Rhodesian history from the original invasion of the territory in 1890 up to the mass
11 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.116- 118.
2 Law, K. (2017). Pattern, Puzzle, and Peculiarity: Rhodesia’s UDI and Decolonisation in Southern Africa. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45(5), p.723.
4
European immigration after World War II. The first chapter will attempt to establish the importance of Britishness to the original colonisation of the territory, particularly in the contemporary South African context and the conflict between Afrikaners and the recent arrivals from Europe. The second chapter will discuss the second major wave of European immigration, from which the vast majority of white persons resident in the territory during UDI originated. In discussing this post-war influx it will be discussed how the concept of standards was employed by the state to attract and retain these immigrants, connecting the visible, often mundane markers of Britishness to the demographic survival of the community and viability of minority control over the country. In the third chapter, we will examine in depth the magazine ‘Illustrated Life Rhodesia’(ILR), a fortnightly publication that ran from 1968 to 1979 as a cultural/current affairs magazine aimed at a white audience. By examining the general content of the magazine and then by discussing in detail the advertisements carried in it, we will hope to gain an idea of the banal forms that national identity took and how these relate to a settler-colonial idea of modernity and history, and specifically how this relates to the British identity of the country’s white population.
Literature Review
Recent scholarship has brought interesting new perspectives to the historiography of Rhodesia. A 2015 conference at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein has led to the publication of several articles which explore the UDI period from a more international and post-colonial perspective, with a particular focus on the economic context and the relationship with concurrent events in southern Africa. 3 In particular, the role of large businesses and their relationship to the Rhodesian Front has come
into focus, with it becoming clear that many in Rhodesian politics doubted the loyalty of businesses with international holdings who were often willing to work with African Nationalists.4 Giovanni Arrighi even
went so far as to contend that UDI was as much concerned with nationalistic, middle England-style anxieties about big business as it was with African nationalism. Given the RF’s relationship to working
3 Kate Law (2017) Pattern, Puzzle, and Peculiarity: Rhodesia’s UDI and Decolonisation in Southern Africa, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45:5, 721-728,
4 Andrew Cohen & Rory Pilossof (2017) Big Business and White Insecurities at the End of Empire in Southern Africa, c.1961–1977, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45:5, 777-799,
5
class whites (which was aided by the collapse of the Rhodesian labour party over the issue of segregation, and the basic fact that a powerful labour movement was ultimately impossible without including black workers) the interplay of economics and class will be of interest to any study of Rhodesian nationalism.
Recent years have also seen a new focus on the demographic history of the colony. The white Rhodesians never amounted to more than 4% of the total population, and a great deal of the increase post-war was fuelled by transient workers who would often move on if work ran out. The first censuses to include black people were taken in the early 1960s, and this made clear just how small the minority really was. As a result demographics became an extremely important political issue and source of anxiety for the white Rhodesians, especially the longer term residents of British ancestry.5 While it will
be important to integrate this sort of research which has seen an upsurge in recent years, I feel it is important to avoid an overly deterministic approach by integrating the demographic anxiety of the Rhodesians into the wider context of political issues in the colony.
The recent book ‘Unpopular Sovereignty’ by Professor Luise White is of particular interest to this survey due to its focus on the cultural world of white Rhodesia and how the population related to whiteness through a specifically British lens, and expressed their national identity in a similar language.6
Professor White’s work examined many of the issues that we will be focusing on in this paper, and in writing this the intention is to add to her work by focusing more specifically on a single publication in detail, rather than on the political/governmental perspectives that she employed. The book ‘Rhodesians Never Die’ by Ian Hancock and Peter Godwin, though it focuses on a later period, has also been of interest because of its exploration of culture and identity.7 Peter Godwin’s own memoir of growing up
in Rhodesia has also been of use as a cultural document, one of many personal memoirs published about
5 Brownell, J. (2011). The collapse of Rhodesia : Population demographics and the politics of race
(International library of African studies ; 28 (NL-LeOCL)147971594). London: I.B. Tauris.
6 White, L. (2015). Unpopular sovereignty : Rhodesian independence and African decolonization. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.
7 Godwin, Hancock, and Hancock, Ian. (1993).'Rhodesians Never Die' : The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia C. 1970-1980. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford UP, Print.
6
Rhodesia since the state’s dissolution.8 On the topic of culture, the work of the author Doris Lessing has
also been of use as an insight into the culture of the white minority population, particularly her own memoir/travelogue ‘Going Home’ (though this was written before the UDI period).9 In trying to
understand the African experience and their relationship to the colonial government, the work of historian and journalist Lawrence Vambe has been very useful, particularly for the first chapter.10
In general, it can be said that new perspectives on the history of Zimbabwe before it gained independence have emerged over the last twenty years, incorporating new approaches emanating from developments in post-colonial theory, settler-colonial studies and nationalism studies. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to our understanding specifically of the cultural developments that made Rhodesia so different from its immediate neighbours, and ultimately made its strange course from 1965 possible. ILR itself has not been extensively discussed elsewhere, nor have there been any in depth studies of visual advertising as an expression of national identity in Rhodesia.
Methodological Approach.
In the first chapter, I will approach the development of Rhodesian nationalism from the perspective of Benedict Anderson’s concept of Creole Nationalism, which he used to refer to the nationalist movements that developed in the Americas among European settler populations who felt culturally close to their ancestral homes but articulated a perceived victimhood and inequality relative to their homelands through nationalist, separatist movements. The white Rhodesians at times aspired to the status of the Old Dominions, hoping to follow the path of Canada, Australia and New Zealand from responsible government to full independence within the commonwealth, making a comparison between their concept of nationality and that of other European settler states relevant.11 In Latin America
Anderson also argued that the initial move to break away from Spain was driven as much by fear of the non-white majorities in their own countries (i.e., the fear of slave revolts) as it was by conflict with the
8 Godwin, P. (1996). Mukiwa : A white boy in Africa. London [etc.]: Picador. 9 Lessing, D., & Somers, J. (1957). Going home. London: Michael Joseph.
10 Vambe, Lessing, Somers, Lessing, Doris, & Somers, Jane. (1972). An ill-fated people : Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes. London: Heinemann.
11 Carl Watts (2008) Britain, the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964– 65, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:1, 75-99.
7
colonial mainland.12 Anderson’s approach to nationalism, particularly in the relationship between
colonies and the metropole, can provide an interesting framework for the study of Rhodesian nationalism.
Furthermore, nationalism studies can here be used as a model to justify the study of material like print journalism and advertising as a form of ‘Banal Nationalism’, meaning the everyday expressions of national identity that were highlighted by Michael Billig following on from Benedict Anderson.13 Everyday cultural objects like advertisements or film reviews can be seen as part of the
wider national project, and inform a people’s sense of identity by placing them in a cultural space that reaffirms the state’s identity and legitimacy. In this specific context, the self-consciously British elements of this identity will be related to the field of British World studies, a field of Atlantic studies that seeks to examine British identity existing beyond the national boundaries of the United Kingdom and how those identifying as such conceptualised Britishness and related to the imperial metropole.14
As a balance to these theoretical models which largely focus on cultural factors, the approach of more materialist scholars like the previously mentioned Marxist historian Giovanni Arrighi and demographic/economic historians such as Josiah Brownell and Munhamu Botsio Utete will be employed to try and connect this process of identity formation to material conditions, if not as a determinant then certainly as an important factor.15
In approaching ILR and the advertisements that will be studied in chapter three, the field of semiotics has been employed along the theoretical model devised by Roland Barthes in his seminal essay
12 Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (Verso), p.48-49.
13 Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London [etc.]: Sage.
14 Bridge, C., & Fedorowich, K. (2003). The British world : Diaspora, culture, and identity. London [etc.]: Frank Cass.
Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Canny, Pagden, Canny, Nicholas, & Pagden, Anthony. (1987). Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
15 Arrighi, G. (1973). ‘International corporations, labor aristocracies, and economic development in tropical Africa’, in Essays on the political economy of Africa / by G. Arrighi and J.S. Saul , p. 105-151.
Brownell, J. (2011). The collapse of Rhodesia : Population demographics and the politics of race (International library of African studies ; 28 (NL-LeOCL)147971594). London: I.B. Tauris.
Utete, C. (1979). The road to Zimbabwe : The political economy of settler colonialism, national liberation and foreign intervention. Washington: University press of America.
8
‘Myth Today’.16 This approach seeks to analyse media as a form mythology, presupposing that said
media contains ideology inherently and that this ideology reflects the nature of the dominant hegemony in a society. The imagery, text and content of a piece of media is approached as a form of language (or meta-language), with the totality of the object under study creating a ‘sign’ in the Saussurean sense. By analysing the media as a coherent whole and trying to understand what it seeks to express in the context in which it was intended to be consumed, we can begin to approach the national identity that forms the linguistic framework in which such a sign has meaning, essentially reconstructing the context that imparts meaning to the object. In relation to advertising specifically, as Bonsu has discussed there is a wide consensus that such media reflects dominant ideology, and can be analysed as such.17 As Oyedele
and Minor further argued, there has been a wide consensus that such rigorous tools as semiotic analysis are necessary to discuss material such as advertisements, which are so reliant on cultural context to impart information and employ such a complex visual language to communicate with their viewer.18 It
is also important to consider the advertisements in the context of general developments in the theory of advertising in the 1960s, when the general theory moved from imparting information to enable the consumer to fulfil needs towards the idea of creating a desire through advertising a product in such a way as to engender a need for it in the consumer.19 In the contemporary African context this must also
be considered in the light of a cultural discourse which presented western consumer goods as a component of the capitalistic ‘civilising mission’, in which the consumption of goods was an important indicator of the all-important civilizational standards which in the Rhodesian context was intimately related to discourses on citizenship and democratic rights.20
16 Barthes, R., ‘Myth Today’ in Mythologies (1957).
17 Samuel K. Bonsu (2009) Colonial Images in Global Times: Consumer Interpretations of Africa and Africans in Advertising, Consumption Markets & Culture, vol. 12/1, pp. 1-7.
18 Adesegun Oyedele & Michael S. Minor, Consumer Culture Plots in Television Advertising from Nigeria and South Africa, Journal of Advertising, vol. 41/1 2012, pp. 94-95.
19 Posel, Deborah. (2018). Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer: Race, Market Research and the Consumerist Project in Apartheid South Africa. Itinerario : Bulletin of the Leyden Centre for the History of European Expansion., 42(1), 120-138.
20 Burke, T. (1993). Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Colonial Zimbabwe, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, pp.249-250.
9 Bibliography
Adesegun Oyedele & Michael S. Minor, Consumer Culture Plots in Television Advertising from Nigeria and South Africa, Journal of Advertising, vol. 41/1 2012, pp. 91-108.
Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, (Verso),
Andrew Cohen & Rory Pilossof (2017) Big Business and White Insecurities at the End of Empire in Southern Africa, c.1961–1977, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45:5. Arrighi, G. (1973). ‘International corporations, labor aristocracies, and economic development in
tropical Africa’, in Essays on the political economy of Africa / by G. Arrighi and J.S. Saul
Barthes, R., ‘Myth Today’ in Mythologies (1957).
Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London [etc.]: Sage.
Bridge, C., & Fedorowich, K. (2003). The British world : Diaspora, culture, and identity. London [etc.]: Frank Cass.
Brownell, J. (2011). The collapse of Rhodesia : Population demographics and the politics of race (International library of African studies ; 28 (NL-LeOCL)147971594). London: I.B. Tauris.
Brownell, J. (2011). The collapse of Rhodesia : Population demographics and the politics of race (International library of African studies ; 28 (NL-LeOCL)147971594). London: I.B. Tauris.
Burke, T. (1993). Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Colonial Zimbabwe, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Canny, Pagden, Canny, Nicholas, & Pagden, Anthony. (1987). Colonial identity in the Atlantic world,
1500-1800. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Carl Watts (2008) Britain, the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964– 65, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:1, 75-99.
10
Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates
Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford:
Oxford University Press, p.116- 118.
Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates
Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Godwin, Hancock, and Hancock, Ian. (1993).'Rhodesians Never Die' : The Impact of War and Political
Change on White Rhodesia C. 1970-1980. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford UP, Print.
Law, K. (2017). Pattern, Puzzle, and Peculiarity: Rhodesia’s UDI and Decolonisation in Southern Africa. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45(5).
Posel, Deborah. (2018). Getting Inside the Skin of the Consumer: Race, Market Research and the Consumerist Project in Apartheid South Africa. Itinerario : Bulletin of the Leyden Centre for
the History of European Expansion., 42(1), 120-138.
Samuel K. Bonsu (2009) Colonial Images in Global Times: Consumer Interpretations of Africa and Africans in Advertising, Consumption Markets & Culture, vol. 12/1, pp. 1-15.
Utete, C. (1979). The road to Zimbabwe : The political economy of settler colonialism, national
liberation and foreign intervention. Washington: University press of America.
Vambe, Lessing, Somers, Lessing, Doris, & Somers, Jane. (1972). An ill-fated people : Zimbabwe before
and after Rhodes. London: Heinemann.
White, L. (2015). Unpopular sovereignty : Rhodesian independence and African decolonization.
11
Chapter 1: The Early History of Southern Rhodesia.
i. British South African Identity Formation ii. The Gold Rush and the Creation of Rhodesia iii. Early Development of Southern Rhodesia iv. Conclusion
12
i. British-South African Identity Formation.
Anglophone colonists began arriving in South Africa from the early 1820s, but the population remained relatively small compared to the Dutch speaking population and limited to the coastal Cape and Natal regions until the beginning of the mineral revolution in the 1870s. Between 1873 and 1883, 25,000 mostly British colonists migrated into South Africa following the diamond boom, beginning a series of immigration waves fuelled by the growth of the mining industry and the expansion of direct British power inland.21 The growth of the British presence was matched by the gradual migration of the
Afrikaner peoples into the interior, beginning with the first ‘Great Trek’ of the 1830s and continuing through the existence of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR, 1852-1902) as the Dutch speaking settlers sought to escape the politically ascendant Anglophone minority.22 The period was characterised
by deep demographic and cultural anxiety on both sides, as the British settlers feared that the rising Afrikaner nationalism would result in their becoming a minority in an Afrikaner dominated state.23
While it might be imagined that the white settlers of European origin would have exhibited a shared identity and consciousness of their position as a settler minority in a majority black country, in practice the British settlers largely expressed a distinct identity in opposition to the Afrikaners.24 They identified
strongly with a conception of Britishness focused on the monarchy, the English language, an Anglo-Saxon ‘racial destiny’, and a strong sense that their position in Africa was underwritten and ensured by their place within the British Empire. This informed a distinct variation of Loyalism which self-consciously identified with the Loyalist tradition in the ‘Old Dominions’ and Ulster.25 The Anglophone
settlers remained distinct in their sense of identity and in their priorities of loyalty well into the 20th
century, and the developments that led to the creation of the two Rhodesias must be understood in the context of the political and demographic struggle between these two groups that characterised the late 19th century in Southern Africa.
21 Saunders, C., ‘Southern Africa, 1795-1910’ in Louis, & Louis, Wm. Roger. (1998). The Oxford history of the British Empire. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford University Press, p.598 and 606.
22 Ibid, p.601.
23 Thompson, A. (2003). The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c . 18701939. The English Historical Review, 118(477), p.623.
24 John Lambert (2009) ‘An Unknown People’: Reconstructing British South African Identity, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:4, p.603.
13
The concept of Britishness in this context requires some further attention. Throughout the various waves of Anglophone immigration the majority of the settlers were English, but it does not appear that the smaller groups (Scottish, Welsh, Irish) exhibited any great discomfort being identified as British, or simply as English, and more politically neutral terms like White English Speaking South African did not come into common usage until the 1950s.26 These settlers shared a common language
and by in large shared a sense of British Imperial identity that was defined in opposition to the groups they encountered, primarily African and Afrikaner but also with the Portuguese to the North. Even into the 20th century up to a third of the British South Africans had been born in Britain, and as whole they
retained exceptionally close contact with a metropole that even second or third generation settlers tended to define as ‘home’.27 Regular shipments of newspapers, letters and books from Britain kept this
connection strong, and Anglican/Presbyterian Churches and regional societies helped to maintain a collective memory of the homeland. This was a concept of Englishness or Britishness defined above all else by the maintenance of ‘standards’, expressed as an opposition to the perceived rusticity of the Afrikaners and the supposed savagery of the Native Africans.28 These standards were highly masculine
and bourgeois, with strictly delineated roles for men and women focusing on a conception of domestic and masculine standards that had to be maintained in an alien environment.29 In the absence of a landed
gentry to enforce the class system, this was a specifically middle class concept of British identity which emphasised the parliamentary and constitutional tradition.30 This followed a common model of settler
Britishness in which social standards (often defined negatively in relation to the other) went along with highly visible markers, such as architecture, flags, war memorials, Anglican churches and British-modelled institutions of governance.31 Similar models of identity can be found in the dominion territories
such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but within South Africa it took on a greater political significance for a group highly conscious of their status as a minority within the minority. For the British
26 Lambert, J. An Unknown People, pp.600-601. 27 Ibid, pp.604-605.
28 Ibid, p.602. Lambert also sees this as intrinsically tied to the Anglophone settlers’ alienation from the Afrikaners’ experience of the Great Trek.
29 Ibid, p.603.
30 Saul Dubow (2009) How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:1, p.7.
31 Lambert, J., (2000) South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s, South African Historical Journal, 43:1, p.209.
14
South Africans, Loyalism to the empire was essential to ensuring their political dominance and their cultural survival, and for the Imperial government their growing presence in the colony was seen as vital to safeguarding British control and dominance over the Afrikaners.32
This being said, the British South Africans were not a homogenous group. They were separated along lines of class and especially between urban-industrial immigrants in the cape colony and later in the Transvaal, and rural-‘Pioneer’ settlers in Natal and later Southern Rhodesia.33 In many areas British
settlers did integrate with the Afrikaners, and over time many began to develop a stronger sense of South African Nationalism in opposition to their Imperial Loyalism. As early as the 1870s Cape Colony politician John Merriman was describing himself publicly as ‘a colonist first, then an Englishman’, a position that prefigures the rise of settler nationalism in the context of the Responsible Government debates in the early 20th century.34 We can relate this to recent developments in the field of British World
Studies as described by Saul Dubow who has argued for a distinction between;
‘…the overt projection of British power from abroad (imperialism) and the assertion of British influence by local actors whose affinities with their new countries of settlement overlapped with their sense of ‘home’ (colonialism).’35
If we accept these definitions we can begin to identify a dialogue that occurs between colony and metropole, in which a sense of shared identity that is initially associated with political unity can develop into an assertion of identity that purports to maintain the cultural affinity while explicitly rejecting direct political association. Over time the attachment of the settlers to the homeland becomes more complex as the reality of the home country comes to differ significantly from the settlers’ memory/conception of it. From an early point the British South Africans associated Britain with a rural idyll, and over time they came to view this as a lost world which they sought to recreate in their new
32 Lambert, J., South African British? P.202.
The Victorian Imperial Theorist James Anthony Froude provides a useful description of the late Imperial dream of a ‘perfect commonwealth’ of Britain, Ireland and a new world of Anglophone settler nations, a new empire underwritten by the planting of loyal populations, in James Anthony Froude, (1886) Oceana. G., & Publisher: Longman, p.14-15.
33 Thompson, The Language of Loyalism, p.622. 34 Dubow, How British was the British World? P.6. 35 Ibid, p.7.
15
surroundings.36 Over time, their attachment to a nostalgic, bourgeois/ruralistic concept of Britishness
alienated them from the country that they professed such intense loyalty to. The process was reciprocated as British sensibilities came to see the settlers as rustic, provincial, and later as incurably racist. The curious result was that by the 20th century British visitors to Rhodesia, which was so proud of its’ ‘British
civilisation’, commonly observed that it felt like an imitation or parody of an imagined middle-English past, one that felt either horrifying or comforting depending on the observer’s own political inclinations.37
ii. The Gold Rush and the Creation of Rhodesia
The discovery of gold at Witwatersrand in 1886 presented immense opportunities and challenges for Paul Kruger’s ZAR. It provided the financial security that the republic desperately needed to maintain its independence from the Cape Colony government, but it also led to an unprecedented influx of African and British immigrants into the Transvaal.38 The British immigrants, known as
Uitlanders, retained their cultural distinctiveness from the Afrikaners and posed a challenge to their
independent status, particularly as British mining magnates grew in power.39 Cecil Rhodes, newly
elected premier of the Cape Colony, saw the Uitlanders as a potential tool in his wider project to contain the ZAR and bring it under imperial control. He used the supposed expansionist ambitions of the republic as an argument for the annexation and colonisation of the African polities to their north, specifically the territory of the Ndebele king Inkos'uLobengula Khumalo (hereafter referred to as Lobengula) and the region occupied by the Shona language group.40 This area had long been subject to
mineral speculation, which may have been informed by the association of the Ophir/King Solomon myth with the Great Zimbabwe ruins.41 Rhodes and others were confident that the region north of the Limpopo
36 Lamber, J., An Unknown People, p.605.
37 White, L. (2015). Unpopular sovereignty : Rhodesian independence and African decolonization. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, p.13 and p.105.
38 Saunders, C., ‘Southern Africa, 1795-1910’, p.609. 39 Ibid, p.615.
40 Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior in Rose, Newton, Benians, Rose, John Holland, Newton, A.P., & Benians, E.A. (1929). The Cambridge history of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.525 -531.
16
would prove as rich in gold deposits as Witwatersrand, and they believed that a British colony there would encircle the ZAR and ensure imperial hegemony over southern Africa.
In 1888 Rhodes’ representatives had secured a treaty and a series of mineral concessions with King Lobengula which formed the basis for their claim to the lands then occupied by the various Shona speaking peoples to his east. The validity of the entire endeavour was based on Lobengula’s claim of lordship over the MaShona, which became part of a colonial ideological construct which portrayed the MaShona as a peaceful, childlike people, in need of ‘protection’ from the aggressive, imperialistic Ndebele.42 As a Bulawayo diarist put it, ‘No one likes the Mashonas (sic), dirty, cowardly lot. Matabele
(Ndebele) bloodthirsty devils but a fine type’.43 This formulation has been hotly contested by the
MaShona themselves, in particular by Lawrence Vambe, who concluded from extensive interviews within his own community in the 1950s that none of the ‘great Shona fraternity had ever been a subject race of the Ndebele.’44 He argued that Rhodes and Lobengula had both misrepresented the reality for
their own benefit. Lobengula believed he could trade away the sovereignty of the Shona while gaining an alliance with the Cape Colony, while Rhodes found it useful to create a proto-typical good natives/bad natives dichotomy to present his invasion as an essentially humanitarian act (this could be compared to King Leopold’s famous employment of the Arab Slave trade construct to justify his annexation of the Congo). For the Shona, the result was ‘the biggest disaster and curse in the entire history of their national life.’45
After securing the mineral concession Rhodes set about obtaining a Royal charter in London. This period had seen a revival of the older chartered company colonisation model in the British Empire, and this was the model Rhodes intended to pursue. Despite some resistance within the Colonial Office and an appeal from King Lobengula to the Queen, the Royal Charter was given and the British South
Also, contemporary newspaper reports occasionally referred to Mashonaland as the area of King Solomon’s Mines, often in reference to the Great Zimbabwe ruins, see ‘Roman Coins found in Mashonaland’, New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]24 June 1894: 4
42 Ranger, T.O. (1967). Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance, Evanstown; Northwestern University Press, p.2.
Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior, p.543.
We can see another contemporary expression of this cassius belli in ‘The defeat of Lobengula’, New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]26 Nov 1893: 4
43Ranger, T.O, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, p.3.
44 Vambe, L., (1972). An ill-fated people: Zimbabwe before and after Rhodes. London: Heinemann, p.60. 45 Ibid, p.58.
17
Africa Company (BSAC) was established in 1889.46 The fact that Rhodesia was established through a
company rather than an extension of the Cape Colony state was to prove important in the development of the settler community, as it allowed them to argue that they had never been under the direct control of the British government or the Cape Colony. It would also have immediate implications once the poor financial prospects of the BSAC became clear in the coming years.
In June of the following year, F.C. Selous formed and led the ‘Pioneer Column’ that would become the foundational myth of the Rhodesian state. With two hundred armed settlers recruited from the Cape and five hundred BSAC police officers, he successfully invaded the Shona territory and established a camp at the base of Harare hill, which would become Fort Salisbury.47 The column
encountered no resistance and experienced few problems crossing a territory that Selous knew well. As Lawrence Vambe tells it, the Shona considered these arrivals to be a curiosity, and did not perceive any immediate threat. As he put it, ‘a more friendly welcome to any occupying power it would be difficult to find in the annals of history!’48 Nonetheless, this endeavour would become foundational to Rhodesian
nationalism, with figures like Selous, Rhodes and Dr Leander Jameson held up as semi-mythical, pioneer founding fathers. In South Africa, the collective memory of the migrations and the Great Trek had separated the Afrikaner settlers from the British, but now the Rhodesians would begin to develop an analogous narrative around their own creation.
Perhaps realising Lobengula’s miscalculation, the Ndebele rose up in rebellion in 1893.49 This
gave Rhodes the opportunity to complete his annexation of their territory, which was proving urgent as the gold deposits in the Shona land had already proven disappointing and the BSAC needed to revive investor confidence.50 Lobengula was defeated and killed, and a Royal Sanction in 1894 confirmed the
company’s authority over the entirety of the territory. The massacre of the Ndebele armies and the destruction of their political institutions now enabled mass settlement across the territory and the
46 Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior, p.544.
Msindo, E., (2016) ‘Settler Rule in Southern Rhodesia’, in Cavanagh, E., & Veracini, L. ed. (2016). The Routledge handbook of the history of settler colonialism (Routledge handbooks) p.248.
47 Ibid, p.545.
And Msindo, E., ‘Settler Rule in Southern Rhodesia, p.248. 48 Vambe, An Ill-Fated People, p.92-93.
49 Ranger, T.O, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, p.127. 50 Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior, p.548.
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beginnings of the development of a racialized land distribution system.51 The MaShona, defying their
classification as a ‘whipped cur’ people, rose up in organised resistance in 1896. Their eventual defeat opened the way for further colonisation of their territory, but it also had an appreciable effect on the settlers’ perception of the Shona, and for a while at least prompted a note of caution in London over policies that might inflame the ‘attitude of the natives’.52
It soon became clear that the hypothetical gold deposits that had drawn huge amounts of men and capital into the dispossession of the Shona and Ndebele did not exist, and this frustration would prove to be immensely important to the development of the Rhodesian national identity. In the coming years, the weakened and failing BSAC would struggle to retain its power in the face of a growing class of settler farmers and small concession miners, setting in place a formula of international corporate interests opposing a powerful regional agrarian bourgeoisie, a recurring drama in which the self-consciously British Rhodesians would come to play a role similar to that of the Afrikaner farmers who had resisted the British establishment in the 19th century. In the 1890s, however, hopes remained high
that the mining concessions would pay off, and the settlement of the region was reported widely and positively in the British press. In a strangely prophetic remark, the Ipswich Journal commented that ‘even if the mineral resources of the land should not prove as successful as anticipated, as an agricultural country she would hold her own.’53 She would have to.
iii. Early Development of Southern Rhodesia
The first three decades of the Rhodesian colony were characterised by a power struggle between the increasingly insolvent BSAC and the increasingly numerous and assertive population of settler farmers. An Imperial Order in Council of 1894 had given the Company the right to govern legislatively and judicially within the territory under the authority of High Commissioner in Cape Town, which included the right to maintain a police force, enact laws, dispense and acquire land, and to regulate
51 Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior, 549-550. A Royal Sanction in 1894 confirmed thei BSAC’s area of authority.
52 Ranger, T.O, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, p.327-329.
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mining interests.54 Tensions began to rise after the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902, but whereas in other
British imperial settlements it could be safely assumed that corporate mining interests would win out over small-hold farmers, Southern Rhodesia’s specific conditions led to a different outcome.55 As it
became increasingly obvious that the territory’s mineral deposits were disappointing, the farmers grew to resent the BSAC’s political power.56 They did not want to be responsible for the company’s debts,
and they opposed the restrictive mining laws that were weighted against small scale miners. In 1907 the BSAC issued a ‘Declaration of Policy’ that outlined a new approach to the settlement of Southern Rhodesia that would promote farming and the granting of small mining concessions. This entailed the promotion of white immigration, and by 1911 the European population had doubled to 24,000.57
Interestingly, most of these immigrants originated in South Africa rather than Britain, implying that the identity formed in this early period would be informed more by the specifically South African Britishness of first or second generation settlers than the contemporary culture of the metropole.58 While
the BSAC retained formal power, they were forced to accept a settler majority on the semi-elected Legislative Council by 1914, and increasingly their power was contingent on negotiation with the settlers.59 A 1918 ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council delivered the final blow to the
company’s prospects when it found that the land within the territory was legally the property of the Crown rather than the BSAC. This did not prevent the company’s board from administrating loans and sales of that land, but it did prevent them from carrying out a major sell-off which was seen as their last serious chance to turn a profit. From this point the BSAC largely prepared to abandon control with as little loss as possible.60
54 Msindo, E., ‘Settler Rule in Southern Rhodesia’, p.248 and 251-252.
55 Arrighi, G. (1973). ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’, in Essays on the political economy of Africa / by G. Arrighi and J.S. Saul , pp. 336-337.
56 Kirkwood, K. Southern Rhodesia, in Rose, Newton, Benians, Rose, John Holland, Newton, A.P., & Benians, E.A. (1929). The Cambridge history of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.685.
57 Ibid, p.685.
58 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.120.
59 Ibid. p.686.
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Resistance to amalgamation with larger polities became another characteristic feature of the Southern Rhodesians. While they attended the 1908 National Convention that created the Union of South Africa, they chose to remain apart even as the ZAR was absorbed. During the First World War the idea of a union with Northern Rhodesia was floated, but the settlers resisted this too. In both cases they essentially feared dominance by some form of other. In the case of the Union, the same anti-Boer sentiment that had led to the creation of the state now weighted them against entry into an Afrikaner majority electorate. In Northern Rhodesia the mining concessions had proved more successful, leading to large scale African inward migration. The Southern Rhodesians perceived their neighbour as being more of a company colony, in which British political dominance was not ensured and a white majority an impossibility (it should be noted that they were then and would remain a tiny minority in their own country, so this was largely a matter of the two settlement’s respective ‘characters’ and the aforementioned maintenance of ‘standards’).61
The same anxieties came in to play as the settlers pushed for Responsible Government status after World War I.62 Charles Coghlan, a descendant of Irish Catholics born and raised in South Africa,
led the campaign through the Legislative Council. Then Secretary of State for the Colonies Alfred Milner resisted, citing the relatively tiny European population of the region, but his successor Winston Churchill consented to a referendum in 1922. Offered the choice between Union with South Africa (which offered clear economic and security benefits) and Responsible Government as an independent dominion, the electorate of just over fourteen thousand white men voted with a clear majority for Responsible Government.63 Coughlan had run a campaign under the banner ‘Rhodesia for the
Rhodesians, Rhodesia for the Empire’, pointing towards a form of Imperial Loyalism that was in many ways the mirror image of the Afrikaner nationalism then on the rise in the Union. For the white Rhodesians at this time, their British identity and their position within the Empire was best preserved outside of any larger union, even if this entailed a precarious position as a tiny minority in a country
61 Kirkwood, K. Southern Rhodesia, p.686.
62 ‘Responsible Government’ in this context literally meant to be self-governing, but for the Rhodesians at the time it had specific implications of a similar status to the dominion territories. Even though Rhodesia was never formally a Dominion along the lines of Canada, the association between this status and Responsible Government would gain cultural significance for the Rhodesians.
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with an agrarian economy and seemingly few prospects for major development. Already, internal and external observers of Southern Rhodesia were commenting on the colony’s specifically British character, which was already viewed as a trait under threat within the colonies and even within Britain itself. As Ethel Tawse Jollie, a key figure in the Responsible Government movement and a veteran of British far-right politics, reflected in 1930, Rhodesia ‘conveyed a sort of super-British Imperialism, a loyalty to Flag and Empire which appears to be old fashioned in Britain today.’64 This was a radical,
militant Loyalism that, as King George V and many others observed, mirrored the rise of Ulster Unionism in the previous decade.65 In both cases the Loyalists saw their position in the empire as a force
to secure their British identity and their economic and political dominance in the face of a nationalistic majority. The interplay of demographic anxiety and colonial identity politics contributed to the development of this complex Rhodesian identity, but none of this would have mattered if the BSAC mining concessions had been successful and the political ascendancy of the farmer-settlers prevented.
64 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’, p.130. 65 Ibid, p.135.
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Conclusion: Colonial Identity Formation.
In a 1987 paper on Barbados, Jack P. Green formulated the following model for the development of identity among colonial settlers in British possessions.66 While it was originally designed for the
Caribbean, I feel that it has enough relevance to be worth applying to Rhodesia. First, it is important to assert that settlers never arrived into a blank state; the ‘virgin territory’ of colonial propaganda did not exist in Africa any more than in the Caribbean. Settlers entered into a ‘social landscape’ formed and defined by the original inhabitants, and this inevitably had an impact on the nature of the colonial settlement. As we have seen in Rhodesia, the creation of a good native/bad native dichotomy between the Ndebele and the MaShona was essential to the initial occupation of the region, and this view of the two peoples would continue to affect the character of the white communities in the country and their relationship to the African majority. The western town of Bulawayo, Lobengula’s former capital, retained its pre-colonial name and romanticised the Ndebele history to a certain extent, viewing them as a ‘warrior race’ and seeking to attribute some of their city’s more frontier, less snobbish character to this heritage.67 The capital of Salisbury, in Mashona territory, conversely rejected any connection to Shona
history and largely viewed the Shona people with paternalistic disdain. The Great Zimbabwe ruins, built by the Shona speaking Rozwi kings, were attributed to some form of lost civilisation, and the MaShona were viewed as recently emigrated nomads without a sense of history or place.68 In a more general sense,
the view of pre-colonial history as one of endless Shona/Ndebele conflict reinforced the idea that majority rule would inevitably lead to the resurrection of sectarian violence and contributed to the sense of a ‘Great Civilising Mission’.69
Green goes on to identify the following further factors that must be accounted for;
1. The socio-economic reasons for arrival in the territory and the socio-economic reasons for continued immigration and inhabitation.
66 Green, J.P., ‘Changing identity in the British Carribean’, in Canny, Pagden, Canny, Nicholas, & Pagden, Anthony. (1987). Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, p.214.
67 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’, p.139.
68 Ranger, T.O.(1967). Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, pp.10-11.
69 White, L. (2015). Unpopular sovereignty, p.172. This would overtime develop into a discourse that presented the country as one of three ‘races’; White, Shona and Ndebele, and argued for the perennial separation of the three under white control (‘provincialisation’).
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2. The cultural standards of the residents, defined in relation to the metropole and to their immediate neighbours.
3. The collective experience of the settlers since arrival (i.e. history).
We have already seen how the initial hope of a successful and wealthy mining colony, which soon gave way to a more realistic goal of a farming country, informed the patterns and nature of immigration into Southern Rhodesia. The lack of a mining boom meant that most of the initial settlers did not become fabulously wealthy, and ensured that for most of the early years white immigration barely outpaced white emigration, and remained lower than African net immigration until the late 1950s.70 This resulted in a small population of conservative, small scale farmers, who remained out of
a sense of attachment to place and culture as much as a dream of wealth, although this was to become complicated by the post-WWII tobacco boom, in which the farmers did begin to get wealthy and an industrialist capitalist class began to develop71. Likewise, we have already discussed the central
importance of ‘British Standards’ to the identity of British South Africans and how this was carried over into Rhodesia. The colonial narrative of the beleaguered European holding up these standards in a harsh, ‘frontier’ environment surrounded by ‘uncivilised’ natives was a key element of Rhodesian identity into the UDI period.72 As time went on, the Rhodesians also began to view themselves as having superior,
or at least more intensely British standards than the metropole, a factor that carried great importance in the lead up to UDI. On the subject of collective history, we can see how the Pioneer Column narrative formed the basis for a specifically Rhodesian sense of history, which was further informed by the two rebellions of the 1890s and the struggle for autonomy and self-governance in the early 20th century.
70 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’, p.124.
Population figures derived from; Passmore, Mitchell, Willson, Young, Mitchell, Margaret T, Willson, Jean, . . . University College of Rhodesia Nyassaland, Salisbury. (1963). Source book of parliamentary elections and referenda in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1962. Salisbury, pp.92-94.
71 Rowe, D. (2001). Manipulating the market : Understanding economic sanctions, institutional change, and the political unity of white Rhodesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p.41.
72 Ethel Tawse Jollie’s 1916 article ‘Some Humours of Housekeeping in Rhodesia’ provides a cogent example, especially as it was written with the aim of attracting settlers from Britain and as it points to the often highly gendered nature of this narrative construct – Jollie, E.T., in Blackwoods Magazine, July-December 1916, pp.641-651.
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It may also be valuable to consider the campaign for Responsible Government with reference to Benedict Anderson’s theory of Creole or Settler Nationalism. He argued that in the Americas a distinct and compelling form of nationalism developed at an early stage partially because of the rise of consciousness among European settlers (particularly in the Spanish Empire) of their second class status relative to those born in the Metropole. Within the colonial empires the highest levels of administration were restricted to those born in Europe, and over time the creole settlers began to rebel against this perceived subjugation by their ‘Kith and Kin’ in the metropole. This also entailed the resistance to profits or taxes generated in the colony leaving the territory and the widespread feeling that the metropolitan government did not understand the specific conditions in the settler state so were therefore ill-prepared to legislate for them.73 We can see traces of a similar nationalist feeling beginning to develop in Southern
Rhodesia as the settlers began to resist the technocratic administration of the BSAC, resenting their restrictive mining laws and their transnational priorities (i.e., their responsibility to their shareholders in London).74 Although they were not separatist at that point, the phenomenon of settler anxiety over the
perceived condescending attitudes towards them in the metropole, as well as the deep conviction that London did not understand the conditions of their society, would prove very important in the coming decades.
73 Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (Verso), p.50-57.
74 For some early examples of conflict between the settlers and the company, see; Ian Henderson (1972) White Populism in Southern Rhodesia, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 387-399.
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Green, J.P., ‘Changing identity in the British Carribean’, in Canny, Pagden, Canny, Nicholas, & Pagden, Anthony. (1987). Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, p.214.
Headlam, C., The Race for the Interior in Rose, Newton, Benians, Rose, John Holland, Newton, A.P., & Benians, E.A. (1929). The Cambridge history of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
JOHN LAMBERT (2000) South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s, South African Historical Journal, 43:1
John Lambert (2009) ‘An Unknown People’: Reconstructing British South African Identity, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:4,
Jollie, E.T., ‘Some Humours of Housekeeping in Rhodesia’ in Blackwoods Magazine, July-December 1916, pp.641-651.
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Leys, C. (1959). European politics in Southern Rhodesia. Oxford: At The Clarendon Press.
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Routledge handbook of the history of settler colonialism (Routledge handbooks).
Passmore, Mitchell, Willson, Young, Mitchell, Margaret T, Willson, Jean, . . . University College of Rhodesia Nyassaland, Salisbury. (1963). Source book of parliamentary elections and referenda in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1962. Salisbury.
Ranger, T.O.(1967). Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance, Evanstown; Northwestern University Press.
Rowe, D. (2001). Manipulating the market : Understanding economic sanctions, institutional
change, and the political unity of white Rhodesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Saul Dubow (2009) How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:1,
Saunders, C., ‘Southern Africa, 1795-1910’ in Louis, & Louis, Wm. Roger. (1998). The Oxford history
of the British Empire. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford University Press, p.598 and 606.
The Ipswich Journal (Ipswich, England), Saturday, October 24, 1891; Issue 9311.
Thompson, A. (2003). The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c . 18701939. The English
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27
Chapter Two: Rhodesia Up to Federation.
i. Introduction.
ii. The Land Apportionment Act iii. The Industrial Conciliation Act. iv. The Post-War Boom.
28
i. Introduction.
The immediate history of Southern Rhodesia after the attainment of ‘Responsible Government’ is one of economic stagnation and the slow growth of a highly transitory, unstable European population. The state’s tax revenues, derived largely from the white farmers, remained extremely low, peaking at around £4 million in 1938, compared to an estimated £10 million in debt accumulated by farmers and a public debt liability of £13.4 million by the same year (about half of which was owed to London).75
Many farmers were struggling to break even and were increasingly reliant on loans to stay afloat.76 The
years from 1921 to 1926 saw a gross European inward migration of 9,855, but the total net immigration for this period was only 2,724. The net immigration fluctuated, but did not reach over 9,000 for any five-year period until after the Second World War.77 Gold remained a key export, but the quality of the
ore was causing problems and during the 1930s asbestos mining was beginning to eclipse it in importance.78 The continued, albeit slow, European population growth along with the ballooning public
debt must be understood in the context of the far-reaching, extensive state intervention that sought to ensure the success of the white settlers. More than just providing utilities like electricity and railways, the Rhodesian government took it upon itself to establish meat refrigeration facilities, cotton mills, iron and steel foundries, and most importantly of all a state Tobacco Board (established in 1936) to organise collective export bargaining for what was to become a key driver of economic growth during and after the Second World War.79 The state in turn endeavoured to cut off the access of African farmers to the
internal food market and to create an artificial scarcity to keep white-run farms profitable (which had the added effect of forcing more Africans into the low-wage farm labour economy to pay their taxes).80
Colin Leys has described the Rhodesian settler state as a government that measured success based on the economy’s ability to absorb new white immigrants at roughly the same standard of living as those
75 Leys, C. (1959). European politics in Southern Rhodesia. Oxford: At The Clarendon Press, p.15 and 18-19.
76 Ibid, p.15.
77 Figures from the Central Statistics Office of Southern Rhodesia, quoted in Passmore, Mitchell, Willson, Young, Mitchell, Margaret T, Willson, Jean, University College of Rhodesia Nyassaland, Salisbury. (1963). Source book of parliamentary elections and referenda in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1962. Salisbury, pp.92-94.
78 Phimister, I. (1988). An economic and social history of Zimbabwe, 1890-1948 : Capital accumulation and class struggle. London [etc.]: Longman,p.222.
79 Leys, European politics in Southern Rhodesia, pp.16-19.
80 Utete, C. (1979). The road to Zimbabwe : The political economy of settler colonialism, national liberation and foreign intervention. Washington: University press of America, p. 17.
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already in the country (rather than on the standard of living provided to the majority of the actual residents of the country), and we can see the effect of this limited metric of success on the state’s heavy handed approach from here right up through the UDI period.81 It has especially strong echoes in the
immediate post-UDI state-organised response to the UN sanctions, which Luise White has typified as essentially a planned economy, in which the primary concern was the maintenance of a standard of living that would satisfy European immigrants and attract more of them.82 McGregor, a Ph.D. researcher
in 1939, reported that government ministers justified the clearly favourable and protectionist approach towards white farmers (which was essentially a system that privileged only the largest landowners against the smaller ones) on the basis that white settlers had a ‘higher standard of living’, a circular argument in which standards of living are not a matter of material conditions but instead something innate, something that white settlers carry with them into the country and which it is the state’s responsibility to maintain.83 In this view, high ‘standards’ become something inherent to the white
population, and it becomes the state’s responsibility to structure the economy to maintain people in these standards. Discussion of the state’s achievements with regard to standard of living in the post-war and UDI eras must be understood in the context of how the state articulated its objectives and how it measured success.
Standards, as we have already mentioned, implied a whole range of cultural signifiers and mores in the context of late-British Imperialism, ranging from parliamentary democracy to marmite.84 The idea
that signifiers of British/European standards (Christianity, the Monarchy, Rugby) were in some way connected to the ability to practice the successful running of a state (i.e., Responsible Government) was key to a national discourse in which words like ‘responsible’ and ‘experienced’ would rapidly become part of a non-racial way of talking about race, in which citizenship, democracy and modernity all became
81 Ibid, p.27
82 White, L. (2015). Unpopular Sovereignty : Rhodesian independence and African decolonization. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, p.135.
83 MacGregor, R., (1940) Native Segregation in Southern Rhodesia; A Study in Social Policy (PH.D thesis, London), p.338-9.
84 The mythical connection of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ to some kind of unique democratic tradition, and the implication that this entailed a unique attachment to and ability to practice things like parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, is elaborated on in Belich, J. (2009). Replenishing the earth the settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.5
The attention giving to securing Marmite under the post-UDI sanctions is discussed in White, Unpopular Sovereignty, p.132.
30
skills - something that could be learned and acquired but was inherent to certain groups.85 The state had
to take an active role in ensuring that the country did not run out of cosmetics or Angusturo Bitters because the concept of what made a person civilized, or responsible, was intimately tied to the maintenance of material conditions and a comparable way of life to that of Britain. But behind this lay a more basic anxiety; the fear that people would simply leave.
Throughout Rhodesia’s history recent migrants were stigmatised for a variety of reasons. They were at different times seen as ‘good time Charlies’, likely to leave at the first sign of trouble, or as the worst racists, unwilling to buy into partnership if it threatened their own material advantage.86 During
the worst years of the war in the 1970s, Rhodesian-born Angus Shaw reversed the formula to claim that the recent arrivals were the most dangerous and brutal soldiers, willing to ‘burn down the odd village’ to preserve a privileged position.87 In general, the simple phenomenon of moving from a council house
in east London to a country farm with servants and acres of cheap land was seen as essential to holding on to migrants and drawing in more, without whom the minority state had no chance. This alluded to something of a British ideal, a ‘Rhodesian Dream’, in which the beleaguered middle class of a post-war Britain could live their own version of the country squire fantasy, complete with domestic servants and big game hunting. The fact that the economy was rapidly coming to rely on secondary industry and that the majority of the new migrants were needed in the suburbs for managerial positions not altogether very different from the type they might have in Britain was of little importance to the ideal.88
The reality was that citizenship in Rhodesia and the Empire at large was a remarkably fluid status. It was possible for a man with Irish parents to be born in South Africa, live most of his life in Kenya, migrate to Rhodesia as an adult and simultaneously consider himself to be British and Rhodesian
85 White, Unpopular Sovereignty, p.54-55.
86 Lessing, D., & Somers, J. (1957). Going home. London: Michael Joseph, p.95-96. Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesian:1890-1980’ in Bickers, & Bickers, Robert A. (2010). Settlers and expatriates Britons over the seas (The Oxford history of the British Empire. Companion series). Oxford: Oxford University Press p.124.
87 White, 193.
88 Manufacturing overtook European Farming in its contribution to the percentage of GNP as early as 1954 and continued to grow, Utete, C. (1979). The road to Zimbabwe, p.30.
The character of Tony in Doris Lessing’s novel ‘The Grass is Singing’ epitomises the often dispiriting reality that greeted British immigrants in the pre-tobacco boom 1930s. After witnessing the murder in the novel’s opening pages he finds he can no longer bare farm work, and ends up in an office job in a mine in Northern Rhodesia, which was ‘exactly what he had come to Africa to avoid’, Lessing, D., (1964) The Grass is Singing, New York:Ballantine Books,p.29.
